Privacy-Aware Ubiquitous-Computing Systems

A Research Topic of the Distributed Systems Group

What lies at the intersection of privacy protection and ubiquitous
computing is easy to imagine: the frightning vision of an Orwellian
nightmare-come-true, where countless "smart" devices with detailed sensing
and far-reaching communication capabilities will observe every single
moment of our lives, so unobtrusive and invisible that we won't even
notice!
With daunting Orwellian
visions looming, it is easy to conclude that tamper-proof technical protection
mechanisms such as strong anonymization and encryption are the only
solutions to such privacy threats. Obviously, the less data is collected, the
fewer privacy invasions can occure. However, perfect protection for personal
information will hardly be achievable, and the interconnectedness of our daily
tasks will render many of the envisaged security schemes largely impractical in
our everyday routines.

Instead, we propose to build
systems that help others to respect our personal privacy, enable us to be aware
of our own privacy, and to rely on social and legal norms to protect us from
the few wrongdoers. We are developing a privacy awareness system targeted at
ubiquitous computing environments that allows data collectors to both announce
and implement data usage policies, as well as provide data subjects with
technical means to keep track of their personal information as it is stored,
used, and possibly removed from the system. Even though such a system cannot
guarantee our privacy, we believe that it can create a sense of accountability
in a world of invisible services that we will be comfortable living in and
interacting with.